Congregational

It is Epiphany – a day of meetings and surprises.
Narrow winter sun pierces lancets,
projecting miracles on whitewash – the walls
just begging for some risen light. The magi moving,

fluid over plaster, bringing gifts to lands
where winter nips unfeeling fingers.
The 4 gas heaters make a brave quartet
But the air is coffin cold, uncaring –

breath clouds, lightens and is quickly gone.
Rejoice. You’re here for what can really bring us
to our knees – the need for death, the hope for life,
the cause of love – and to share a silence that reflects

on wishes, that can condense in actions all our days.
True, Church is more than gravity and graves,
so now we’re older, becomes the everything
we were, gives back the people we’ve become.

But keep away those O.T. resurrected texts
where ministries of learning are grained
like wood into our cells. This stuff goes back
into its own mistakes and never can be changed.

And no amount of transubstantial talk
can match the truth of Christ’s own forsaken cry
up on his cross – “Why have You gone?”
he asks. “Thank God,” it’s tempting to reply,

for it’s that sudden, brilliant lack of faith
that keeps me curious, and here. That pain, torture
and despair that makes a suicide like his a crime
of love to solve as urgent as any on TV.

So souls or cells? How close they sound.
We move eternal into light – science burns
forever, triumphant genome of the stars –
so keep the faith. As Larkin said, it’s going on.

Death of a Naturalist

The obits fill the papers for a week. Heaney
is Dead. Disinherited – we dumbly stare,
as if a shaded bulb had failed at the far end of a passage.
It’s Dover Beach and  anarchy is briefly born –
to mix it with the metaphors and references.
We all share touches from the man we never knew
but may have met – a moment on the damascene
when his Irish voice speaks calmly from the fire.

So here is mine. With Digging firmly in our thoughts,
it came as a surprise  he crossed the Irish Sea
to Birkenhead with no pen in his bag.
His reading done, we faithfully produced our copies
to be signed. Deficient of a book, I had
the pen the time required. Now dry, it nestles
in its drawer. It’s 40 years since it was called
to rescue a poet with no pen – a man
with confidence that nothing on that day be needed
to be writ down. So, Parker Vector Rollerball,
you took the place of spade, and left his mark
upon two dozen pages. I would have happily
allowed him pocket it and disappear.
An honest Ulsterman, he gave it back again.

Nobodies

The murder of a mistress excites an editor or two
But this defendant is the first to face his fate
on camera, so lawyers have their say,
then leave it to the judge to read the verdict
on The News. It’s Guilty and before you know,
he’s gone to spend his years reflecting
or resisting all the ends that sentences entail.

A determined innocent he declined to answer
any particle that made the cloud of evidence
that brought him down. And it’s a house of
horror tale no jury could resist.
Each circumstance weighed heavy with the next –
the luring, lonely basement, filled
with suffocated wishes; the kitchen scoured
with bleach in an over spotless house;
the hair caught in a carpet; the freshener
that lingered in the boot; the tape which could
have bound a quartered body, butchered
into meat. And then the search for rocky
tracks that must have caused the damage
to the car as it defiled the empty wilderness
that slinks now round an unmarked grave.
You could not write it for TV.

Poor girl, she’s not found to add her
body’s outrage to the day. Instead
the empty land they think she’s in
yields five more bodies in her stead.
Four buried and one abandoned
on a beach. What their sacrifice was
only can be guessed. Their resurrection
brings no judgement day on anyone.
But she escaped, and love is free
to keep its council in his cell. Out there
concealed in urban post codes five more
killers guard their secret liberty
to see what hidden death may call.

In 2012, a friend told how a colleague of her husband’s was being tried for murder in Edinburgh. It was a crime of passion, with no body, and entirely circumstantial evidence. The verdict was to be televised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Pilley

Limbo Flight

for Michael Morley

I learnt the news by email on a mobile phone –
and now I’m in the air, and far above the words
your ex-wife said in church, you may be gone.
Jevington’s the Ward you’re on – the place

my mother went before they said her mind
was out to grass, so somewhere in the EDG you too
are paused between being here and not.
A bed, a label round your wrist, and tubes

running everything, in and out like breath.
The scent of clinical disinterest and dressings,
and people waiting to be gone.
So who can save you now? Timothy Winters?

Gavin Maxwell? HG Wells? Can Rhyme
or Reason keep that lamp alight?
Recall the grey Novembers in Room 1 with us –
Ridouts banished, and Readers silently in view.

And all those comments in your envied hand,
beneath our own, that blessed, or struggled
to be kind – poised, artful, middle class
– to sum or stem the chaos scratched from every

Osmiroid you made us buy and use.
Each small remembered thing must call
you from oblivion, so let that knowledge
go to battle on your part – give you protection

from the Will you told us Hardy had believed
held everything to its Immanent ends.
Ignore the ice, the smeering worm that slimes
the glass. Keep close all memories that structure

up that life, your past – even the Nazi bomb
that killed your mum when safe in hospital,
the student minds that struggled to outfool you
over Lear, the plays that gathered glory

in the brightness of your stage. You gave
us leave to speak, to act, and chance to write
with no restraint – unlike so many tinpot
sirs, you let us in, became our friend,

and shared thoughts, laughter, and your life.
I’m close to God at 20,000 feet so hear
this almost prayer. Like flight of planes defies
the life of gravity, I pray you can delay

the pull of what must come when all our engines
stop. Let this be the lesson, then. In us you live.
Live on some place we may together go.
And write this final line yourself, when well.